Battery chargers can be designed to use a constant voltage difference between a voltage provided by a linear regulator that is chosen to be large enough to ensure other portions of the battery charger have the headroom needed for charging the battery. Battery chargers can utilize independent circuit loops to detect a supply voltage provided to the battery charger, an output voltage provided to the battery, the input current of the battery charger, and the input voltage of the battery charger. These loops generate separate reference voltages, and then the terminals providing these outputs are ‘Wire ORed’ together, e.g., all of the references voltages are provided to the same node to provide the dominant voltage that is used to regulate the voltage provided to the battery. However, this configuration of a battery charger having separate loops with separate reference voltages increases design complexity and difficulty, and by itself can result in the voltage provided by the linear regulating being larger than actually needed for at least portions of the charging period of a batter, thus increasing power consumption.
The use of the same reference symbols in different drawings indicates similar or identical items.